Ryan Lackey, ex-CTO (Chief technology officer) of HavenCo is moving on with other plans. His company was at the centre of an ambitious project to create a ‘safe haven’ on a sea-platform form in the English Channel. HavenCo was launched in June 2000 amidst much fanfare and publicity from magazines like Wired and aspired to provide a ‘safe haven’ to companies into gambling, porn, providing free movies, audio which elsewhere would get into legal hassles.

He said, ‘My business partners had become nervous about hosting objectionable material and were leading the company toward financial ruin, with only about six customers remaining.’

'The key lesson on this is if you're going to put a co-location or virtual site-hosting facilities somewhere, political and contract stability in that jurisdiction is very important,' Lackey said addressing an audience at the DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas.

The company’s representatives beg to differ. An official commented, ‘He (Lackey) is no longer in a position to know details about its workings. We have a moderate-sized installation which is growing monthly, very many more than the alleged six customers and their servers in operation, and in the last eight months or so have been able completely to reengineer our network and its international connectivity arrangements'.

What is HavenCo? It’s a World War II British gun-tower, six miles off England’s cost, which intended to be a co-location facility housing virtual companies that would have legal problems setting up servers in other parts of that world. The abandoned platform also known as 'Sealand' claims to be an independent nation with its own currency, stamps and flag!

Lackey, claims that HavenCo owes him over $220,000 in cash and stock and criticises the Sealand family for tampering with the network.